Self-immolation and asylum in Australia: ‘This is how tired we are’

The slow violence inflicted upon the 28,621
individuals seeking refuge in Australia waiting on bridging visas to hear whether
they can remain, can be seen as a form of state sanctioned “letting die.”

Four Darks in Red, Mark Rothko (1958)On 27 April 2016, Iranian Omid Masoumali set himself on fire
on Nauru in front of visiting representatives of the United Nations Refugee
Agency (UNHCR). Nauru, a small country in Micronesia with a population of just
10,000, is the location of one of Australia’s two offshore “regional processing
centres,” the other being on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. All those who
arrive in Australia by boat and claim asylum are transferred to one of these
two detention facilities. The Australian Government does not run
either regional processing centre, instead the Governments of Nauru and Papua
New Guinea manage each centre under their own law, and receive funding from the
Australian Government. The Papua
New Guinea Supreme Court recently ruled that the detention of asylum
seekers was illegal and in breach of the country’s constitution. According
to government
records, as of 31 March 2016 there are
currently 1,373 people being detained on Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
Those that are found to have valid claims for refugee status are able to settle
on Nauru or in Papua New Guinea. The Australian government maintains a policy
that no one held in its offshore detention facilities will be given protection and
allowed to settle in Australia.

Omid, who was 23, suffered third degree burns and died in
hospital in Australia several days later, after waiting over 24 hours for the
medical airlift team from Australia to arrive. In reading about the actions of
Omid my thoughts turned to Leorsin Seemanpillai. I wrote about Seemanpillai in
my PhD research, being drawn to his story because self-immolation is a rare
event in Australia. Seemanpillai was a 29 year old Sri Lankan. His family
escaped violence against Tamils in Sri Lanka and had lived in India as refugees
since 1990. Seemanpillai arrived by boat in early 2013, prior to the Government’s
move to transfer all maritime arrivals offshore, and was living in the
community on a temporary bridging visa while awaiting the outcome of his claim
for asylum. He had the right to work, share a house, and travel within the
country. Seemanpillai was an active member of his local church, volunteered at
an aged care facility, acted as a translator for other Tamils, and regularly gave
blood. And yet something happened to mean he decided on 31 May 2014 to set
himself on fire in the front yard of his house in Geelong, just outside of
Melbourne. He did not make a public declaration. Seemanpillai died from his
burns the following day.

At the time Seemanpillai’s self-immolation was reported as
an isolated incident. It was described
by the then Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison as a “terrible
and tragic accident,” and Morrison informed the media that “I frankly don't
think anyone is in any position - to draw any conclusions about what
is in a person's mind in this situation.” Seemanpillai was the second
Sri Lankan in the space of several months to self-immolate in Australia in 2014.
His act was followed by another incident on 20 June 2014 by an unnamed man, and
the self-immolation of Khodayar Amini on 18 October 2015, a
Hazara Afghan who was also on a bridging visa awaiting his claim for asylum.

Omid was a recognised refugee, whose claims of
persecution in Iran were found to be valid. Omid and his wife were living in
the community within the Nibok settlement on Nauru. While previously those
seeking asylum were held in closed detention until their claims were
determined, in October 2015 the government of Nauru allowed all asylum seekers
held at Australian detention centre facilities to move freely around the
island, with the camps run as “open
centres.” The Australian government began to
release people into the community in 2014 after their claims were met, and the
threats to personal safety and violence faced by women, often unaccompanied by
family members, led
to some to plead: “Let me stay in the camp, because the
camp at least is better than outside.”

Several days after Omid’s self-immolation, a young Somali woman,
Hodan Yasin, set herself alight on Nauru, causing burns to 70 percent of her
body. Yasin was flown to a Brisbane hospital where her condition is listed as
critical. There are no further updates readily available from media as to whether
Yasin is recovering. She had been returned to Nauru recently after receiving
medical treatment in Australia. Media reports state that in between these two
events, at least six other acts of self-harm or suicide occurred on Nauru.

While we are drawn to the spectacle of
a person setting their body on fire, the self-immolations of Omid, Yasin and Seemanpillai,
while occurring under different conditions, suggest there might be a connection
between these cases. Omid and Yasin faced the uncertainty of many more years
spent living on Nauru and without any hope of settling in Australia.
Seemanpillai had not been informed of the status of his claim for asylum, had
not attended an interview, and did not know how long the process would take. Between
October 2012 and September 2014, which was during the time
that he was living in country, the Australian government deported
approximately 1,300 Sri Lankan asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka.
Seemanpillai had witnessed friends and members of his community having their
asylum cases rejected.

It was reported that before Omid set himself
on fire, he
cried out “This is how tired we are, this action
will prove how exhausted we are. I cannot take it anymore.” Why are individuals
setting themselves on fire on Nauru, and while living in Australia? What are
the modes of exhaustion that impact upon those individuals detained by Australia’s
immigration policies?

It is tempting to speculate as to the
cause of self-immolation. In her work
on hunger strikes among political prisoners in Turkey, Politics
Professor Banu Bargu’s uses the term “weaponization of life” to designate political struggles undertaken through
non-lethal actions and those more likely to lead to fatalities. After being
tortured in prison, one participant in Bargu’s research stated,
“We did not have any other means of resistance than our bodies at hand. Either
our bodies would be transformed into weapons against us, through torture, or we
would use those bodies as means of resistance against the state.”
Sociologist Michael Biggs suggests the definition
of self-immolation as a protest pivots on a particular “declared intent to advance a
collective cause.” As an act of protest it is “intended to be public.” However,
does this mean that suicide or forms of self-harm performed within the home or within
the yard, which are more frequently undertaken by women in this location (the highest reported rates of self-immolation occur in India, Egypt Iran and Sri
Lanka), and occur without declared intention, are not political statements? Self-immolation
in public declares the person as having political agency, and yet
Seemanpillai’s actions confound the ease of attaching such forms of intention
to those who set themselves on fire in public. It leads to questioning whether
the self-immolations occurring by those seeking asylum can be singularly
understood as political acts.

The Australian government has its own
interpretation. While Seemanpillai’s act was an “isolated incident,” current Immigration
Minister Peter Dutton claims that the recent self-immolations were not about
the conditions on Nauru but because of economic frustrations in not reaching
Australia after paying people smugglers. Refugee advocates in contact with
those on Nauru have also been blamed
for encouraging political action, and for providing “false hope” to those
living on Nauru. In each case, the government has taken a lead role in
determining the intention of each person, and giving meaning to
self-immolation.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli,
who has lived and worked with Indigenous communities in the far north of Australia
for over 30 years, describes a particular form of violence that occurs under liberal
governments who try to govern and control social and cultural difference
through social policy and legislation. Povinelli describes this governmental violence
as “the violence of enervation, the weakening of the will rather than the
killing of life.” The resulting feeling of exhaustion or fatigue is mirrored in
the words spoken by Omid. In her work Povinelli explores the differences
between certain spectacular acts of “state killing” and those that involve
barely perceptible, or unspectacular acts of “letting die.” These forms of
letting die can be camouflaged as modes of giving life.

Povinelli has written more directly on the exhaustion of
Indigenous populations in Australia, however it is not possible to ignore the
similarities in the treatment of those seeking refuge and those who are
Indigenous in both being told they do not belong. For example, these modes of
giving life can include enabling those awaiting decisions on their temporary
protection visas to remain in the community. However, with long processing
waiting times and without access to public funds, this uncertain situation,
rather than offering protection, inflicts other forms of violence upon those
who are vulnerable. Seemanpillai’s
roommate said at the time, “Leo was always talking about the
fear of being deported back. That fear is in everyone.” In describing
the psychological trauma of being in a period of waiting, a close friend of
Seemanpillai’s and an advocate at Rural Australians for Refugees, Cathie Bond, stated,
“Such is the terror of being sent back … they know they will be picked up
within days. They're totally vulnerable.''

Therefore time plays a crucial role in how self-immolation
might be understood in particular contexts and under conditions of
vulnerability, beyond the heightened catastrophe and media focus on the political
nature of the act. While it appears that events in Nauru have escalated
rapidly, there can be slow decomposition behind the spectacular event of
self-immolation. Omid and Yasin lived in detention for three years before
setting themselves on fire. Prior to his self-immolation Omid was allegedly
informed he would need to remain on Nauru for 10 years. Seemanpillai waited 18
months without any indication of whether his claim for protection would be
accepted, and had been living as a refugee since the age of six. These timings
are not suggestive of heated actions or quick flare ups. Looking at
self-immolation over a longer period of time suggests it that there is seldom a
single point that leads to the acute response. It means it is highly unlikely,
despite what Dutton has suggested, that refugee advocates were able to convince
those on Nauru to self-immolate.

In Povinelli’s work, “quasi-events” are the means by which
the dispersed sufferings that can occur in attempting to sustain and keep on
living, register beneath the surface. For those seeking refuge, the anxiety of
uncertainty and the sheer effort involved in waiting might be thought of as
imperceptible quasi-events that involve their own forms of endurance. These
quasi-events exist alongside the spectacular media events of deprived
conditions and detention centres. These are not so easily measured within metrics
of vulnerability when assessed by healthcare workers, or when visitors arrive
from the UNHCR. As Seemanpillai and Omid’s cases seems to attest, the violence
of immigration detention extends beyond the government’s careful narratives that
seek to contain the issue within financial transactions and tragic accidents.

While self-immolation draws attention to the immediate act
of violence, it can distract attention away from the “slow violence” of immigration detention. Writing in the
context of the environment, Rob Nixon
describes slow violence being incremental and accretive, where
government and media appear only to react to the catastrophic time of natural
disasters and ignore chronic and slow moving forms of deterioration. Here
it is possible to see how slow violence can occur through living in conditions
of uncertainty, and the forms of endurance required to maintain lives under
conditions where nowhere seems to offer protection.

In the current coverage and debate over Australia’s policy
of offshore detention, there appears little room for stories of the slow violence
inflicted upon the 28,621
individuals currently waiting on bridging visas within the country, without
any certainty as to whether they will be allowed to remain, if only on
temporary protection visas, or be deported back to the violence or poverty they
were trying to escape. While people are exhausted on Nauru and Manus Island, these
forms of exhaustion and tiredness can be seen across those seeking refuge in
Australia. In the deaths of both Omid and Seemanpillai it is possible to see
how waiting in uncertainty becomes a form of state sanctioned “letting die.”

This article was first published 10 June 2016. It is republished here as Australia announces a plan to close the Manus Island Asylum Centre.

Read more research-based articles on oD 50.50'sPeople on the Moveplatform showcasing the voices and analyses that are
marginalised in the public debate on migration.

About the author

Tiffany Page is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and is researching vulnerability. She also writes on and works collaboratively in addressing sexual harassment in higher education. She tweets at @t_haismanpage.

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